Monitor Your Company’s Reputation with Google Alerts

Reputation Management is an important part of SEO. You want to make sure that what appears on the first page of search engines is what you want people to see. Every company will have one or two unsatisfied customers. Sometimes they will remain unsatisfied even after you’ve tried to correct the problem.

That’s where it can get tricky. If your particular customer decides to take his or her complaint to the internet, you’ve got some work ahead of you. However, if you can spot the complaint before it gets too much notice you’ll have greater control over your brand’s online reputation.

Google Alerts allows you to monitor select keywords and where they are appearing on the internet. For example, I have an alert set up for “SEO like a PRO”. Because I’ve chosen to monitor this particular phrase, Google sends me an email every time it gets mentioned somewhere online. This is also a very popular phrase though, so I do get a lot of alerts that aren’t necessarily related to this website or my book. I also have an alert set up for my name. It’s not a very common name so the alerts I receive on that one usually are about me.

To set up your own alerts, first choose the keywords you want to monitor, then go to http://www.google.com/alerts and select how often you’d like to receive the alerts from the drop-down. You’ll also be able to choose the type of alert (blog, video, etc…) and whether you want “only the best results” or “all results”. Enter your email address. Google Alerts will send you an email requesting you confirm that you’ve set up this alert. Confirm that you have and you’re done. From now on you’ll receive alerts and will be able to use that information to manage your online reputation more effectively.